Batcave

It seems like no more than a handful of months are allowed to pass before we are presented with yet another Optimus Prime toy. Be it from a new movie, new cartoon, or the latest video game, there is always an Optimus on the shelf. Not that this situation is a bad situation to be in, being an Optimus Prime fan and all. However, as with all things quantity does not always equal quality... (I'm looking at you, Cyberverse.) Every once in awhile though... A Prime to best all Primes lands on store shelves. Enter Transformers War for Cybertron: Siege Optimus Prime. Yeah... That's a lot of words for one toy. Siege Optimus, like all of the other characters in the line, is a very faithful throwback to his original G1 robot mode with a slightly modified Cybertronian vehicle mode. The robot modes are where the Siege line really shines. Everyone is very well articulated and looks exactly like you would expect a G1 character to look. We all know the original G1 toys looke...

A few months ago I dusted off this blog which I had not touched since 2011. The reason? I was prompted by an article written by Mike Elgan about how famed podcaster and internet host Leo Laporte was dropping social media all together. No Facebook, no Twitter, not even an Instagram. Leo retreated to the safety and security of his own blogs. A world totally under his control. That got me thinking about my terribly limited use of social media (i.e Google+) and why I even bother using it. My engagement on the once flourishing Google+ had all but dried up. I really only communicate regularly with three or four people on the platform these days. All of this lead me to examine the reasons I still bother to post anything to Google+ and the answers were pretty simple. The primary use? To share photos of our travels and grandpuppy with our family. The others? To read the news and to share and converse about things that I like and that matter to me. Then came the announcement that Goo...

In 1986 McDonald's released what might have been the greatest Happy Meal toys ever created. Jim Henson's Muppet Babies . They were just as awesome as the cartoon and twice as fun! :) They were the perfect size to fit into about anything we wanted to play with. They fit in the seats of most G.I. Joe vehicles and yet were small enough to be used as Monopoly pieces. We constructed all sorts of Lego vehicles and houses for them and created endless adventures for them in the backyard. (Yes, children in the 1980's played outside.) They went with us on trips and hide in our pockets to school. Possibly the best toys I even had. Flash forward to 2018, 32 years later. Today I found the first Muppet Baby figures created since the spectacular originals! Of course I had to buy them. :) They are a line of toys based off a new DIsney Junior show that isn't half bad. It's nowhere near as awesome as the original but still very fun to watch. The first wave includes ...

I mean really? Do people still post things to "blogs" or has everything totally gone the route of social media? Obviously I haven't used this thing actively since 2010. I was a bit surprised to see it all still here. Most of the images are busted as they didn't transfer over after Google killed Blogger FTP support but all the text is still hanging around. More about that fiasco here . I do wonder if we will see a resurgence in blogging with all the recent trends of abandoning the hate filled social media arena. That is honestly why I looked back at Blogger after not having touched it for eight years. It looks like Google has pretty much abandoned this platform as well. I wonder which product they will kill first? Google+ or Blogger? You never really know with Google... (Picture of the dog is totally unrelated. Blog post just need picture ya know.)

So how does this work? Good? Bad? Why should I even use blogger these days? :)

Mostly just testing to see if mobile photo posting still works.

I received an email today from Blogger informing me that as of March 26th they will no longer support FTP blog publishing. My blog has been powered by Blogger since 2004 and FTPed to my hosting service. I really don't know exactly what I plan to do. This site can remain exactly as it is but I will no longer be able to update it via Blogger. For the time being I plan to move this blog over to http://batcaveweb.blogspot.com . Google supports custom domains and such but I'm not really sure I want to continue to use Blogger after this change. I will loose all of my custom sub-pages and a whole lot of customization ability. The same goes for the Istari blog. I will be moving it over to http://istariguild.blogspot.com . I may at some point use the custom domain option to redirect batcaveweb to the Blogger server but I doubt it. I will probably have to start from scratch and move to some custom content system. However, I really don't use my blog all that much these days so...

In today's issue we head a little south of the border... Oh noes... Busted Bat-taco...

A friend recently linked this article on twitter so I thought I'd give it a read. I was expecting a logical, well though out argument about how Apple has drastically changed the mobile phone industry in the United States... That wasn't what I got. As I read on I thought he proceeded to mock the anti Apple folks, you know, the haters with out provocation? Well deserved, they should be mocked. People who rail on something without getting their facts strait (regardless of their views) need to be set strait. After a few more paragraphs I assumed I would start to see the logic and reasoning of the cleverly crafted article... It never happened... What I got instead was a completely biased and inaccurate list of things that only Apple themselves could do. So, lets look at the list shall we? (I'll add my comments below each numbered entry.) 1. Carriers ruled the industry with an iron fist (True, but only in the United States. Anyone with any will or knowledge could easily ac...

Did you ever think it would be funny to hear something said in the "Batman voice"? You know... Something that you would probably never hear Batman say. Maybe I should do more of these... Dunno.. We'll see. *remember to read it in your best Batman voice. :)

Saturday we are headed out to Kansas City to our first ever G.I. Joe convention. I don't know if it will be half as cool as BotCon but I am very excited. Good news is that it isn't all that far from home so if it sucks not a huge wasted trip. :) Check it out: http://www.gijoecon.com

But some times you just gotta face the facts...

And so little time... So many things I am thinking about today and no time to ramble on about them... Can't cram it all into 140 characters. ;)

The entire reason I started using Twitter if the first place was to have an excuse to play with the many clients available for Windows Mobile. I have a thing for good software. :) After quite some time I thought I had finally settled on a Twitter client for my phone... Until I saw a news post about this great new Twitter client called Twikini. I'll admit, the name put me off a bit at first but it looked nice and claimed to be fast (which my current Twitter client was far from) so I gave it a try. Having only used Twikini for a day I was convinced. It was FAST and just had that feel of really well written software. It was a joy to use. Twikini's feature set is truly amazing, there are far too many to go into here but I'll touch on a few I really like. Inline display of Twitpic pictures! This is a great feature and a true time saver. Most of the time a quick thumbnail view is all you really need to get the gist of someone's Twitpic post. For those times when you need mo...

We recently purchased 25 refurbished Cisco switches from a company. One of them was defective so we returned it or another one. Well, that one arrived today in this box... That's just nuts... ;) Ah! There is something in there! All this box for a single switch??! Umm, ok...

Yes, spring is here. At least today anyway. Frakin screwy weather... I had a nice drive home from work todat with the top off the car. Then helped the wife finish off mowing the yard for the first time this year. Looks like rain and maybe sleet over the next few days though... Least we got one nice day. :)

So this is what Alastria comes home with yesterday. He should make a nice addition to my desk. :) He looks really cool if you turn out the light and shake him real good. :D

I got this spam mail today and just had to share... It is a rather nice spam form letter but it appears that someone actually forgot to populate the form fields. :D So, if you ever wondered what uncooked spam (mail) looks like here you go. ;) Spam FAIL!!